In the chaotic weeks after Hurricane Katrina's floodwaters receded from New Orleans and St. Bernard Parish, returning residents and political leaders faced a confounding dilemma: what to do with more than 100,000 flooded homes, representing nearly 60 percent of the parishes' combined housing stock.

Less than a month after Katrina, the Army Corps of Engineers' estimate of the volume of debris created by the storm assumed that every building that stood in the floodwater for longer than a few days would be leveled.

It was thought that entire sections of New Orleans would be bulldozed, the structures too fragile to rebuild. In St. Bernard Parish, officials said 80 percent of all properties could well be razed.

A touchy waiting game ensued. Officials had to balance countless individual circumstances calling for delay with a need to improve the surroundings for those who returned.

Four years later, distinct approaches have emerged in the two parishes: St. Bernard has proceeded with an aggressive pace of FEMA-financed demolitions, tearing down nearly one-third of its pre-Katrina housing in an attempt to rid neighborhoods of homes that could go unoccupied for years.

New Orleans has been much slower to bulldoze, often trying to allay preservationists concerns, as well as some residents' post-storm fears of a land grab in vulnerable areas. What remains is a city with about one-third of its residential structures unoccupied.

"It's two very different views of the future, and none of us knows which view is right," said Wade Ragas, who analyzes home sale trends for the New Orleans Metropolitan Association of Realtors and has done studies for St. Bernard. "The St. Bernard strategy is that they're trying to resize for a long-term smaller community. Orleans seems to be on track to think, 'We will get back to our old population; we hope that people will instead renovate.'¤"

Both approaches have drawn some criticism.

The active demolition tactic has brought complaints from some homeowners who said they weren't notified until it was too late. The more hands-off approach has left homeowners frustrated over lingering blighted shells that drag down their neighborhoods.

At the four-year mark, St. Bernard has nearly completed its demolition program, with 7,666 homes brought down since the effort began in 2006. The parish anticipates only a few hundred more demolitions through the end of the year, the parish's deadline for federal reimbursement.

In New Orleans, despite having more than seven times as many pre-storm housing units as St. Bernard, only 6,312 properties have been demolished since Katrina. But the bulk of New Orleans' demolitions were handled by the corps in the early months of recovery -- many at the request of owners.

Since City Hall took over the tear-down program in late 2007, just 1,629 homes and 33 commercial buildings damaged by the storm have been brought down, with FEMA footing the bill, agency records show. The city has used separate federal block grants to raze 402 buildings unrelated to Katrina.

But the window for FEMA-financed demolitions in New Orleans has ended, along with St. Tammany Parish. It is slated to end in September in Slidell, and in October in Jefferson Parish. Plaquemines Parish, like St. Bernard, has until year's end.

Different housing stock

For St. Bernard, the challenge is rebuilding from the ground up. For New Orleans, it's repopulating within an existing shell.

In many ways, the sweep of the destruction in St. Bernard has made the cleanup task less complicated for policymakers and residents. Unlike in New Orleans, where flood damage ranged from minor to catastrophic, nearly all of St. Bernard's housing stock was under deep water, meaning residents who came back were unified in their resolve.

The character of the housing stock differed, too. The dense collection of one-story 1960s and 1970s ranch homes in Chalmette were subject to less neighborhood and preservationist scrutiny than historic cottages in New Orleans.

Before tearing down properties across a vast swath of New Orleans, City Hall must secure approval from a pair of panels that weigh historic and planning priorities.

"We had to strike a balance," said Winston Reid, Mayor Ray Nagin's code enforcement chief. "St. Bernard did not have to go through all of the historical processes. They didn't have preservation interests. They didn't have the stakeholders that we did because of our unique housing stock."

In a quirk of recovery vocabulary, "demolition" in New Orleans initially meant simply hauling away the remains of structures that had collapsed or floated off their foundations into public rights of way.

With structures that were not literally toppling over, the wrecking ball generally was seen as a last resort. More often, officials gave property owners -- particularly those waiting for insurance or Road Home payments -- as much time as possible to clear the blight, Reid said.

Officials were keenly aware of financing shortfalls, as well as residents' distress over rumors that whole neighborhoods would be leveled for green space or industrial use, he said.

"Some people panicked," Reid said. "They had concerns about us taking their property. We needed to calm those fears. The goal was to clear hazardous situations. The goal was to revive the heartbeat of New Orleans."

Not everyone has been a fan of the city's deliberate pace. Critics have complained that the months-long wait for committee hearings, along with officials' inclination to extend deadlines to allow owners to comply with the code, repels investors and makes life miserable for neighbors.

City Councilwoman Cynthia Willard-Lewis, whose district experienced catastrophic flooding, said she sympathizes with residents who lacked the resources to return.

But she said the Nagin administration should have done more to figure out why lots were blighted, then targeted owners "living in comfort outside of the state."

"When you have stuff that is falling down, when you have properties that have grass 6 feet tall, when there is clearly no effort to even cut the grass, board up the doors and windows so vagrants cannot get in," she said, "that demonstrates total neglect and abandonment, not only of the home but of the community."

Reid acknowledged problems but said his staff tried hard to maneuver the gauntlet of opposing interests. In many cases, he admitted, the decision to give property owners months or years to gut houses and tend lawns backfired.

"We did what we felt was right by the people," he said. "Unfortunately, you have some people who abandoned their (obligation) to be a responsible landowner to their neighborhood."

'Just start the process'

In St. Bernard, where nearly 80 percent of the parish's housing units had severe damage, according to federal estimates, the immediate post-storm demolitions were often obvious structural problems. Owners also gave parish contractors the authority to demolish, happy not to pay the costs themselves.

Parish inspectors fanned out across the neighborhoods in 2006 and 2007, documenting homes without records of building permits and compiling a list of street addresses for condemnation. The Parish Council in early 2008 approved a huge list of more than 5,000 condemned properties.

Residents were notified by letter. They could appeal the condemnation by meeting with a three-member citizen panel and showing any of the following: the proper permits, evidence of repairs that met codes, proof that the property was tied up in litigation, proof that Road Home money had recently come through, or evidence the house had recently been sold.

The committee then forwarded a recommendation to the parish's Office of Safety and Permits, which decided whether the home would be demolished.

Thousands of homes, some that were sold to the Road Home program, came down with little opposition. But earlier this year, some residents and former residents began to complain that the parish was overstepping its authority in tearing down homes they wanted to keep.

Many of the houses were in various stages of disrepair: some gutted, some windowless, many lacking basic utilities. But residents who wanted to save them thought their lots had more value with homes on them, even if the homes were in bad shape.

"It got to the point where the parish said, 'Look, just start the process of the house, do something with it,' " said Anita King, president of the Chalmette Vista neighborhood association and a member of one of the citizen review panels for demolitions. "They didn't want to tear houses down. The parish wanted people to come back. ... But it got to the point where they said, 'I'm not coming back, but you're not going to do something with my home.'¤"

Dozens of property owners filed temporary restraining orders to stop demolitions. Parish President Craig Taffaro changed course last winter, signing agreements with homeowners that set specific timelines for making progress on repairs.

Concrete slabs still dot much of the parish, with the Louisiana Land Trust two months into a massive slab-removal contract that will eventually tear out 3,400 slabs from Road Home properties and possibly another 3,000 slabs from private properties.

Neighborhood groups and parish government have lots of ideas for post-slab St. Bernard: larger lots through a "lot next door" program; pocket parks on vacant street corners; and community lakes and ponds to improve drainage.

"If you turn back, almost as if to watch a movie reel of the development of St. Bernard, that's exactly what you had," Taffaro said. "There were empty lots, and over time houses filled in those lots, and eventually developers moved into another area and repeated that same process. So what we're faced with is doing the same thing."

New wave of demolition

With federal financing no longer available, Mayor Ray Nagin's code enforcement director said his office is taking a new approach to the estimated 66,000 unoccupied residential properties -- about one-third of all New Orleans addresses -- that still dot the landscape, an untold number of them beyond repair.

Reid, the code enforcement chief, said he expects "another wave of demolition" to begin soon. This one will be financed by limited block grant dollars and focused less on the state of individual properties than on strategies for enticing investors and improving quality of life that have the support of neighbors.

In coming months 1,500 homes, mostly in newer sections of Gentilly and eastern New Orleans, are expected to be demolished by contractors with the Louisiana Land Trust, the nonprofit holding company for parcels sold to the Road Home. Most of the structures are more than 50 percent damaged and lie below the base flood elevation.

The empty lots will be turned over to the New Orleans Redevelopment Authority for sale to neighbors or developers, an agency official said.

Ommeed Sathe, NORA's director of real estate strategy, said his agency's decisions also hinge in part on whether a parcel with a house on it is more likely to attract a buyer.

That depends, he said. The agency is inclined to tear down properties with little historic value in low-lying areas, in part because restoring an existing home usually poses a greater flood risk than building to new, stricter standards.

"The derelict properties that have been abandoned are a real disincentive to investment in these neighborhoods," Sathe said. "We hear in the neighborhoods all the time that they'd rather have a demolished house than an unsightly, rat-infested house sitting out there."

Chris Kirkham can be reached at ckirkham@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3321. Michelle Krupa can be reached at mkrupa@timespicayune.com or 504.826.3312.